"Air India inquiry told bomb screening device ineffective"

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Test a bust
Air India inquiry told bomb screening device ineffective
By Kim Bolan
Canada - The Vancouver Sun


Six months before the 1985 Air India attack, an RCMP bomb expert tested the
device the airline was using to screen luggage and found it ineffective
unless it was an inch away from open explosives.

Gary Carlson, who remains with the RCMP in Vancouver, told the Air India
inquiry Tuesday that he was a junior officer when a group, including
representatives from Air India and Transport Canada, met on Jan. 18, 1985 to
test the PD-4 sniffer.

The device was being used by Air India as a back-up to x-raying bags on its
weekly flight that stopped in Toronto and then Montreal.

"I had a vial of gunpowder that I brought to this test...I placed it in the
bottom of a garbage can and put the lid back on...there was no reaction from
the machine," Carlson testified.

He said that within the group there was "first shock oh my God - what is
this? And then general discussion that this machine wasn't detecting
anything."

Carlson, who worked with his bomb dog Thor at Pearson International at the
time, said he was so concerned about the ineffective equipment that he
stressed to the Air India official to call him any time there was a
suspicious bag or parcel.

"In all the time Air India came into Toronto, I did not receive a single
call.," he said.

Neither Carlson nor Thor was at Pearson on the weekend of June 22-23, 1985
when Air India Flight 182 was targeted by a terrorist bomb plot., he told
inquiry head John Major.

Even though heightened security dictated there was supposed to be a bomb dog
available for Air India throughout the month of June 1985, Carlson testified
nobody was on duty and no dog handler was on-call.

His testimony comes days after a former Quebec police officer rocked the
inquiry when he testified he was called to Mirabel to search the Air India
plane hours before it exploded, but the flight departed 15 minutes before he
got there.

Serge Carignan said he was on-call because the RCMP dog and his handler were
away on a training course.

Carlson said he and Thor were in Vancouver at the same training course with
the other five or six specialty dogs trained to find bombs.

Inquiry counsel Anil Kapoor showed Carlson a document indicating that there
should have been a dog on duty for the level of security Air India was under
at the time.

"Are you aware if there was any back up provision?" Kapoor asked.

Replied Carlson: :"There was no other bomb dog in the region....that was not
a possibility."

So when the ex-ray machine broke down at Pearson with about 60 bags left to
load onto to Flight 182, Air India staff  used the same PD-4 sniffer that
had been proven useless a few months before.

The Vancouver suitcase carrying the bomb that brought down the plane and
killed all 329 aboard was among the final bags screened.

If he had been available, Carlson said it would have taken him and Thor
about 20 minutes to check those bags for explosives.

He testified that there was a special crew of police officers trained to
hand search bags for bombs if no dogs were available, but they were not
called out on June 22 either.

The inquiry has heard of repeated threats to the airline in the months
before the bombing and a lack of communication between the agencies charged
with security.

Earlier Tuesday, a former RCMP superintendent in charge of VIP security in
1985, says he was concerned about a lack of information sharing in the weeks
before the Air India bombing.

Richard Muir, who retired in 1986, told the Air India inquiry that
information about the threat level to Indian missions in Canada including
Air India - was being shared during committee meetings and not necessarily
between the heads of departments that needed to make decisions about
security.

"I remember thinking we are going to have to set up better lines of
communication," Muir said, He said that he had always dealt with one person
in External Affairs on such matters, but that suddenly the lines of
communication were shifted when an ad hoc working group on Sikh terrorism
was set up about three weeks before the bombing.

"This was most unusual for me. This was a first sir."

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